Euro Exim Bank Ltd - Facilitating Global Trade

Euro Exim Bank is a young and revolutionary international financial institution founded in 2015, headquartered in St. Lucia in the West Indies. The bank holds a Class ‘A’ license from Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA) of St. Lucia and is a member of the Caribbean Association of Banks (CAB). With a Representative Office in London and a network of affiliates, agents, and partners in key locations, they serve to import and export businesses around the globe.

Euro Exim Bank (EEB) specializes in connecting customers to opportunities, enabling businesses to economically and efficiently export and import goods and services. It facilitates and supports companies to fulfill their trade aspirations and realize their investment ambitions in challenging jurisdictions. As a specialist company, they provide not only Letters of Credit but also regulated Bank Guarantees and Performance Bonds. Additionally, they are looking at extending their platforms with foreign exchange services and an introduction of tradeable cryptocurrency-based digital assets.

Germination Of An Idea

It originally started as a Small Payments Provider (SPI) in the UK; however, due to diminishing margins and the business competitiveness, the SPI model was no longer sustainable to the company’s growth. Spotting a gap in the market, the company applied for an international regulated banking license in St. Lucia, under the strict auspices of the FSRA, with trade finance as the primary business. Today, Euro Exim Bank is recognized as an industry leader, internationally known and respected at trade conferences, significant events, panels and are winners of several industry awards.

Mission-Mindedness Drives Success

The mission of EEB is to help corporates in the process of importing goods from around the world. The ecosystem of trade with all its players and the complexity of regulation and documentation makes trade difficult for smaller new companies. EEB seeks to remove this burden and provide comprehensive, competitive, and compelling services using their digital platforms, blockchain-enabled applications, and years of experience, ultimately facilitating global trade.

Their vision is to expand their sales teams, geographic reach, and market attractiveness, making them the pre-eminent provider of trade instruments globally.

The Differentiating Factor

The EEB approach, designed to mitigate risk through future-ready home-built IT platforms, embedded blockchain, and IT applications, and dependency on robust KYC and indemnity processes, allows their clients to trade more competitively and cost-efficiently, placing them ahead of cash-strapped competitors.

EEB also realizes that R&D is quintessential for their sustainable growth since they are self-controlling the entire build and maintenance of their trade platform and managing the integrations through commercial API with commercial software and databases used in legal, compliance and payments systems. Their IT team’s flexibility, agility, and expertise in creating a quality future-ready trade platform, incorporating blockchain, machine learning, and AI, integrated with AML and KYC databases, ultimately allows them to maintain and fully control risk profiles.

Their differentiators thus include, trust, leadership, experience, personal relationships, country expertise, speed of response, IT, cost-effective instruments, and above all, continued contact and information sharing.

Changing With Changing Times

Additionally, in partnership with RippleNet, Euro Exim Bank has implemented innovative Ripple services, enabling settlement of cross border transactions using XRP cryptocurrency. This is more cost-effective than traditional international wire transfers and much faster and virtually instantaneous.

They achieve this through Ripple xCurrent and On-Demand Liquidity (ODL), which facilitate frictionless, real-time direct financial exchange. The former direct cross-border payments into customer accounts without correspondent bank relationships or currency fluctuation. The latter minimizes liquidity costs, reducing cash flow issues, using XRP as the underlying digital asset, rather than switching into more expensive often restricted fiat currencies.

The Team Ethos & Culture

EEB’s staff is based in multiple locations encompassing many religions, ethnicities, and cultures. With their careful hiring policy, they ensure each individual can exhibit talents that will help create a unique work environment, where learning, sharing, and performing to the best of their abilities is akin to their job roles.

EEB’s international teams of experts have years of Trade Finance and SWIFT experience of sophisticated instruments and transacting via an extensive network of contacts and counterparties covering Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Australasia, and South America. The team ethos also drives the practice of employee-praise and recognition, which leads to high morale and optimism. This, combined with the leadership role-models, trust, agility, and teamwork, contribute to an employee-friendly culture.

The Roadmap Ahead

EEB’s agenda has plans to grow its sales team, gain more country-coverage, speedup instrument issuance processes by technical enhancements, and accessing more clients in opportunistic emerging markets. Euro Exim Bank is well-positioned and ready to work with smaller currently disadvantaged companies, finding trade initiation solutions and enabling them to rightfully and economically competitive in the more full international arena.

The Dynamic Leadership Duo

The Director of Euro Exim Bank Ltd, Kaushik Punjani, and the Head of Compliance and Operations, Graham Bright, are the two sturdy pillars helping EEB to achieve enormous success.

Backed with a degree in Chemistry, Kaushik Punjani moved into manufacturing, global distribution, and then into the finance industry, where he used his accountancy talents as he essayed the role of a CFO. Ultimately, he founded Euro Exim Bank. His experience covers on-line payments systems, confirmations, reconciliation, and his functions have covered management and delivery of financial solutions at UK businesses at all levels. He thus has a unique understanding of both the technical side and the business requirements. He is also very active on the CSR front. He often organizes large-scale social and cultural events, funds charities to help the weaker sections in India and support the Asian Blind Association (ABA) in London.

The technically proficient industry professional, Graham has 35 years of experience, of which he spent 20 years at SWIFT and five years spanned in computer services companies. He is a Justice of the Peace, former MD of a European Bank software business and ex-Banking/ Investment Management Director of a leading US data storage company. He is also a regular speaker at international trade industry conferences and a frequent contributor to trade journals.